Saturday, October 5, 2013

Our Founding Fathers included Islam

Thomas Jefferson didn't just own a Quran -- he engaged with Islam
and fought to ensure the rights of Muslims

[He] sais “neither Pagan nor
Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of
the Commonwealth because of his religion.” — Thomas Jefferson, quoting
John Locke, 1776
At a time when most Americans were
uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson
imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement
with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before
he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives
still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early
America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents. That
relationship remains of signal importance to this day.
That he
owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic religion, but
it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson
first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of his
intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John
Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims—and Jews—following
in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter
for more than a century before him. Jefferson’s ideas about Muslim
rights must be understood within this older context, a complex set of
transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
Amid the
interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some Christians,
beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test case for
the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their toleration for
all believers. Because of these European precedents, Muslims also became
a part of American debates about religion and the limits of
citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the United
States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to
the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of
religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and
potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the
United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural
polity. And if the latter, whether political equality—the full rights of
citizenship, including access to the highest office—should extend to
non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of
the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the
parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to
interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious
test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state
level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of
religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and
extent of a separation of religion from government.
Resistance
to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the eighteenth
century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a millennium of
negative distortions of the faith’s theological and political character.
Given the dominance and popularity of these anti-Islamic
representations, it was startling that a few notable Americans not only
refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day when they would be
citizens of the United States, with full and equal rights. This
surprising, uniquely American egalitarian defense of Muslim rights was
the logical extension of European precedents already mentioned. Still,
on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal at best. How,
then, did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights survive
despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate of
that ideal in the twenty-first century?